“I thought we was doin’ business, Nickels. This feels more like a stickup.”
“It’s going to be a killing if you boys don’t do what I say. Now take off your got-damn coat and put the money on the hood.”
This had gone from bad to worse. It was all about the money. The AK had a thirty-round magazine. After Nickels dropped Lewis, he’d empty it through the door and into Peter. There was a lot of acreage for burying bodies out here.
Behind Nickels, the pole barn door opened and a second man stepped out. Raising another long gun.
Shit, shit, shit. Peter tasted copper in his mouth. Before he could think twice about it, he picked up the .357 and stepped bareheaded into the rain, keeping the big pistol out of sight behind the door. “Fuck it, Lewis. Let’s go. These guys don’t have shit.”
Nickels began to pivot toward him, gun up and ready. “Hands up or you’re dead.”
Lewis moved so fast he was a blur. He grabbed the rifle barrel with one hand and pulled it down and away. Under pressure, Nickels pulled the trigger. A jet of orange fire shot from the suppressor into the trees. Then Lewis stepped in close and gave him a hard elbow in the head.It sounded like thumping an overripe melon with a wooden mallet. Nickels fell on his ass in the mud and Lewis had the weapon.
“Lewis, behind you.” Peter raised the .357 toward the second man and thumbed back the hammer. The metallic click cut like a razor through the sound of the rain. “Drop the gun,” he shouted. “Drop it or I’ll shoot.” He was maybe forty yards away, not the easiest shot with a four-inch barrel.
The man didn’t reply. He didn’t even hesitate. The gun kept rising.
Peter pressed the trigger. The .357 leapt in his hand. The man with the rifle staggered back, but he still held the weapon.
Peter thumbed back the hammer again and tried to squint the rain from his eyes. By then, Lewis had managed to reverse Nickels’s rifle and raise it. He beat Peter to the trigger with three rounds on full auto. The man fell forward and was still.
At Lewis’s feet, Nickels was on his knees clawing under his Army coat. Peter sprang forward and kicked him in the stomach. Nickels flew back.
Peter tore open the coat and pulled an automatic pistol from the holster on his belt, then got back to his feet, weapon ready, eyes scanning for another shooter. Lewis did the same.
They stood there in the deepening mud, breathing hard. The rain came down as though it would never stop.
There were three trucks at the house, but so far only two men.
29
June
After locking the door and checking out Stella’s house, the first thing June did was fire up her laptop in the dining nook. She didn’t have Stella’s Wi-Fi password, but she didn’t need it. Because her work was often sensitive—and because, years ago, she’d been hacked at a Starbucks, which for a tech journalist was fucking embarrassing—she’d started using a mobile hot spot, which allowed her to connect securely to the internet from any place with a cell connection.
She’d already texted with Lewis’s friend Robert, and knew that he was up late, working. June had plenty of computer skills, but Robert’s knowledge was light-years ahead of hers. She let him know she was online, and he sent her a permission box to allow him to access her system remotely. She clicked yes. If you can’t trust a professional white-hat intrusion specialist to peek inside your shit, who can you trust?
Waiting for his software to sync, she peeled open the tinfoil and removed the burner Peter had taken from the killer’s Toyota. RewrappingEllie’s phone, she shook her head, thinking again what a bad idea it was to take evidence from a murder scene. She’d have been pissed at Peter for doing it, but she knew he hadn’t done it lightly.
Mostly it was a serious indication of how much losing KT was messing with his head. June got that. Losing a good friend was messing with her, too. She hoped the phone would give up some secrets that Captain Durant wouldn’t have otherwise shared. Or—and she knew she was rationalizing here—maybe Durant’s people wouldn’t even have bothered with it.
When you’ve already decided what happened, why continue to actually investigate?
Following Robert’s instructions, she plugged the burner into her laptop with a spare cable from her bag, so he could use his pro-grade tools to unlock it from his hacker lair.
“Ready,” she texted. “How long do you think this will take?”
“A few hours, tops,” he replied. “These cheap phones don’t have strong security. You’re lucky it’s not an iPhone. Those are a lot harder.”
She sent him a few kiss emojis along with a reminder to send her a bill, then pulled out the bundle of old maps Peter had taken from Reed’s apartment, similar to the bundle he’d found in the Toyota’s glove box. Pulling off the rubber bands, she flipped through the collection. He had one for every state except Alaska and Hawaii. Very strange. She unfolded the top map, which was for Washington state.
It was covered with markings. They were like hieroglyphics or alien pictograms, made with ultra-fine-tipped pens in multiple colors. Dense in places and sparse in others, each dense section was linked to others by ruler-straight lines. Like an org chart or genealogical diagram, only far more complex.
Adding to the mystery was a column of numbers written down the side of the map in the same spidery hand. Each row was fourteen digits long with no breaks. Too many digits to be telephone numbers.Maybe account numbers? Or email addresses? There were ten sets, each unique.
She opened the next map, Oregon. It had a similar set of hieroglyphics and column of numbers. California was the same. And Arizona. And Nevada. What any of this meant, she couldn’t even begin to guess.
Although maybe there was no sense to be made. Maybe the diagrams were just the product of Reed’s tangled mind, referencing some abstract internal structure that only he could see. He sure had put a lot of work into it, though. She’d share the diagrams with Peter and Lewis. Maybe they could figure it out.
